A Brave New World of Hiring: How Asynchronous Interviews and AI Reshape Recruitment

Technological advances are transforming how firms screen and evaluate job applicants. This paper studies how automating the collection and evaluation of interviews reshapes the applicant pool and the downstream consequences for evaluation and hiring. In a natural field experiment with over 3,000 applicants, we randomize candidates into asynchronous audio or video interviews, live online interviews, and a no-screening benchmark. We find that asynchronous interviews decrease application continuation by over 50 percent, including the most qualified applicants, implying that interview technologies systematically change who enters the hiring process. A complementary vignette experiment shows that this deterrence is driven by perceptions of increased competition and reduced fairness. Automating interview evaluation via AI generates systematically different evaluations from humans. Human evaluators assign lower scores to women and underrepresented minorities, and are less predictive of subsequent labor market outcomes. We show that AI, unlike humans, does not suffer from cognitive biases that impact their judgment.

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